Ditto on your comment about John McWhorter's recent op ed in NYT -- I am an avid McWhorter reader / viewer / listener. Always appreciate his deconstruction of ideas. But I think he misses the mark on pronouns. It might be fascinating to to watch language evolve, but this is more than that -- its humanity changing. While humans who we now call transgender have always existed, they did so with their bodies intact and with no illusion about their sex category. And, they probably adjusted pronouns when various circumstances seemed to warrant that. What is going on now is quite different. Surgeries. Hormones. Denial of the necessity of sex-segregated spaces. The pronoun mandates are emblematic of all this. Thank you for tackling these ideas.
Ditto on your comment about John McWhorter's recent op ed in NYT -- I am an avid McWhorter reader / viewer / listener. Always appreciate his deconstruction of ideas. But I think he misses the mark on pronouns. It might be fascinating to to watch language evolve, but this is more than that -- its humanity changing. While humans who we now call transgender have always existed, they did so with their bodies intact and with no illusion about their sex category. And, they probably adjusted pronouns when various circumstances seemed to warrant that. What is going on now is quite different. Surgeries. Hormones. Denial of the necessity of sex-segregated spaces. The pronoun mandates are emblematic of all this. Thank you for tackling these ideas.